/cutline/manual.md

User Manual

Cutline 1.0 for iPad and iPhone · Developer Working Model LLC

Cutline traces photos, sketches, logos, and paintings into clean vector shapes. You can edit the result piece by piece and export it for a cutting machine, laser, or plotter. Everything is live: change a setting and the trace redraws right away.

# 1.0Quick start

1. Import. Tap + in the library and choose a photo, a file, or one of the built-in samples.
2. Pick a style. Each style says what the trace will do and what it's good for, like Flat colors · logos & clip art or Subject only · photos.
3. Tune it live. Drag Colors, Detail, and Smoothness. Every change re-traces right away. There is no apply button.
4. Refine. Tap any piece to recolor, hide, or delete it. Drag points to fix curves and straighten wobbly lines.
5. Export. Set the real cut size, add a kiss-cut or die-cut line if you want one, and share SVG for Cricut (plus PNG, PDF, and DXF).

The side panel follows that same journey in four tabs. Input is the source picture: crop, adjust, rotate. Trace is how the picture becomes vectors. Refine is which colors you keep, plus cleanup. Pieces is your selection, the piece stack, and the touch-up tools. Tapping a piece on the canvas switches the panel to Pieces for you.

# 2.0Bringing in an image

Tap + in the library to import from Photos or Files. You can also share an image to Cutline from any other app. In Safari, touch and hold an image and choose Share, then Cutline; this works from image searches too, and Cutline downloads the picture for you. PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, and WebP all work. Very large images are scaled to 4096 px for tracing.

Projects save themselves. Reopening a project restores your trace, your edits, and your export settings exactly as you left them.

# 3.0The Input tab

Everything about the source picture lives here.

• Project name. Rename the project any time.
• Crop. Crop the photo opens the full original with drag handles. Corners resize the box, dragging inside moves it, and dragging outside draws a fresh one. Apply crop re-traces just that area. The crop is non-destructive: Edit reopens the full photo so you can loosen it, and Clear brings the whole picture back. If you have rotated the design, the crop preview shows the picture rotated the same way.
• Adjust photo. Brightness and contrast, applied before tracing. Useful for faint scans and dim photos.
• Rotate. 90° turns, plus a Straighten slider for crooked photos. Rotation survives re-traces, and physical size is set at export.
• Background. The canvas backdrop: checkerboards, white, black, or Custom color… to preview your art against the vinyl or wall color you're cutting for. This is view-only. Exports keep a transparent background.

# 4.0The Trace tab

Pick a style, then tune the sliders. Each style is a starting point built for a kind of art:

• Colors. How many colors the trace uses (2 to 32, color styles only). Cutline picks the palette from the image itself and keeps small but important colors even in busy scenes. Lowering the count combines similar shades first. Light and dark sage merge together long before orange would fold into brown, so your design's distinct colors survive as the palette shrinks.
• The color dots. A live preview of the palette sits under the slider, one dot per color in use. Tap a dot to jump to that color's controls in the Refine tab.
• Detail. Higher keeps more small pieces. Lower cleans up noise and specks.
• Smoothness. Higher rounds corners more.
• Fine detail (thin lines). Traces at higher resolution so thin strokes survive.
• Lines. On the two line-art styles you can choose Outline or Centerline. Outline traces around the ink, which is what you want for cutting shapes out. Centerline draws one line down the middle of each stroke instead, so a pen, foil quill, engraver or scoring tip follows it once. Without it, a machine given an outline draws every letter twice, hollow. Centerline pieces stay lines all the way through: they export as open paths, which Design Space and Silhouette Studio import as draw lines and laser software puts on its own layer for scoring rather than cutting. On a centerline trace, Detail drops short strokes and stray hairs, and Smoothness sets how closely the line follows the ink.
• Pieces. Layered stacks pieces like vinyl layers. Single-layer makes flat puzzle pieces that don't overlap.
• Trace an area only. Tap it, then drag a box on the canvas to trace just that part of the image. This sets the same crop as the Input tab's crop tool, just with a quicker gesture. Repeat to zoom in further. Clear returns to the full image.
• Compare original. Blends the source photo under the trace at any opacity. You can also touch and hold the eye button on the canvas to peek at the original at full strength.
• Hand-trace with the pen. Auto trace does the heavy lifting; hand-trace anything it missed. The original fades in like tracing paper, and strokes you draw become normal pieces you can recolor, edit, and export.
• Reset all edits. The escape hatch at the bottom. It removes every edit (recolors, deletes, rotations, touch-ups) and re-traces the source fresh. Your auto-trace settings stay.

# 5.0The Refine tab

Refine is where you decide which colors your design keeps. Each color in use gets a row with the pieces it covers:

• Tap a row's swatch to recolor every piece in that color at once. Handy for matching vinyl colors you actually own.
• Touch and hold a dot or row for more: pin the color, view it alone on the canvas, or select all of its pieces.
• Rows expand. Each row shows piece counts, hide/show eyes, and locks, and expands into its individual pieces.
• Pin a color. Touch and hold a dot or row and choose Pin color — always keep. Pinned colors wear a pin badge and are guaranteed a place in the trace. Drop Colors all the way down and everything else combines around them, but a pinned color never disappears. Pin your subject's primary colors, like a monarch's orange or a logo's brand red, before simplifying. Pins stick with the project, survive style switches, and unpin from the same menu.

Three whole-image switches live here with the colors they affect:

• Remove background (photo subject). Isolates the photo's subject and traces it alone.
• Remove shading. Evens out shadows and lighting before tracing, so a sunlit and a shaded patch of the same color trace as one color instead of two. On by default for the Photo style. Leave it off when the shading is part of the art, like watercolors and posters.
• Edge color removal. Finds the color around the image's edges (paper, scanner bed, wall) and leaves it out of the trace, without needing subject removal.

Clean up finishes the job. Speck size finds tiny stray pieces that are hard to weed and slow to cut, and removes them all with one tap. Smooth all pieces simplifies the whole design at once.

# 6.0The Pieces tab

Your trace is made of pieces. Tap one on the canvas to select it, or drag on empty canvas to select everything inside the box. The panel switches to Pieces and shows what you can do:

• Recolor. Use the fill color well, or touch and hold a piece on the canvas and choose Pick color from photo to eyedrop the original image.
• Select similar color. Grabs every piece in the same color group.
• Combine into one piece. Merges the selection. Cricut Design Space calls this Weld. Holes are preserved.
• Hide / Lock / Delete. Hidden pieces stay in the project but won't export or cut. Locked pieces can't be selected or erased by accident.
• Smooth. Reduces points while keeping the shape. Press again to smooth harder. The button shows the point counts before and after.
• Transform. Drag the selection to move it. Use the corner handles to scale and rotate.

The stack

Below the tools, All pieces lists the whole design, front of the stack first, with a thumbnail and hide/lock state for each piece. Tap a row to select and zoom to that piece. Touch, hold, and drag a row to restack it; the top of the list sits in front on the canvas. The ⋯ button on each row has the rest: Bring forward and Send backward for one-step nudges, Separate islands to split a piece made of disconnected parts, and quick hide, lock, and delete.

Touch-up tools

Draw, Add polygon, Erase, and Erase mask launch from this tab. While a tool is on, a small bar floats by the art with the brush size, color, and the way back. On iPhone the panel tucks down to its handle so the canvas stays clear while you work.

• Draw paints new pieces in the fill color.
• Add polygon places straight-edged shapes point by point. Tap the first point again (or Close shape) to finish.
• Erase removes as you stroke. Instant, and undoable.
• Erase mask is the careful eraser. Paint the area first (it shows in red), use Un-paint to fix overshoot, and nothing is removed until you tap Apply. Then the whole painted area is erased in one undoable step. Locked and hidden pieces are never touched by either eraser.

# 7.0Points and curves

Every piece is points and curves. Select a single piece to see its points, or turn on Show points in the Pieces tab to see them on every piece.

• Move. Drag a point. Drag its handles to bend the curve on either side.
• Make smooth / Make corner. Switch a point between a flowing curve and a sharp angle.
• Add point after / Delete point. Refine or simplify a stretch of the path.
• Straighten. Tap a point, switch on Straighten to next tapped point, then tap another point. The path between them snaps to a straight line. Perfect for wobbly scans of things that should be straight.

Undo and redo live in the toolbar and cover every edit (⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z with a keyboard).

# 8.0Cut-ready export

Tap the share button, top right.

• Send to. Pick where the file is going and Cutline sets the format, the profile and the units together. Each choice says exactly what it writes: Cricut Design Space (SVG with no width or height attribute, drawn at 72 units per inch, so it imports at your size instead of shrinking to 75%), Silhouette Studio (SVG at 96 units per inch with the size written in — also the right choice for Illustrator, Inkscape and Affinity), Glowforge / laser SVG (hairline strokes with no fills, grouped by color, cut contours in red), LightBurn / xTool / RDWorks (DXF in millimeters, one layer per color plus CUTLINE and THRUCUT), Print (PDF at true size with a magenta die line), and Image (PNG). The format and profile rows underneath still work if you'd rather set them directly.
• Why the laser choice is different. Laser and plotter software reads a filled shape as "engrave this area" and a stroke as "follow this line". A filled SVG sent to a Glowforge asks it to burn your artwork solid. The Cut lines profile writes strokes instead.
• Size. Set the real-world width in inches or millimeters; height follows the design's proportions. This is the size your machine cuts.
• Cut line. Adds an outline around your artwork. Kiss cut is sticker-style, one contour around everything. Die cut cuts through, with a margin you control. Choose Rounded or Square corners and the offset distance.
• Copy as SVG. Puts SVG source on the clipboard for pasting straight into other tools.

Cut check

Above the export button, Cutline looks over the exact geometry that is about to ship and tells you what it finds, at the size you set. Size matters as much as shape here: the same design can be fine at 11 inches and full of pieces too small to weed at 3.

• Pieces too small to cut. Under about 1/16 inch. A blade tears specks that size out of the material rather than cutting them, and you can't weed them by hand.
• Hair-thin pieces. Narrower than half a millimeter across. They cut, then tear when you weed or transfer them.
• Loose islands. A piece sitting inside a hole in another piece of the same color. Same sheet of material, nothing joining them, so it falls free as the cut finishes — the inside of a stencilled O. Place them by hand, bridge them, or turn on a cut line to hold everything on one backing.
• Duplicate cuts. Two pieces on the same line, so the blade travels it twice.
• Machine limits. Piece and point counts against the limits of wherever you're sending it. Cricut's ceiling is Cricut's; LightBurn has no upload limit at all, and the check says so.
• Open lines. Centerline pieces, listed so you know which parts will be drawn or scored rather than cut out.
• Layers. When you're layering vinyl, every color is a separate cut on its own sheet, weeded and aligned by hand. Above five colors Cutline says so, and tells you how many pieces that really is. Pieces of the same color that touch weed as one, so this is the true count, not the number of paths in the file. It's a note, not a warning: whether a color can go is your eye's call, not the app's, so nothing here changes your design.

Each finding is a single line. Tap it to see why, and tap again to fold it away, so a check you already understand stays out of your way.

Every finding offers a way out. Show me selects and frames the pieces on the canvas so you can see the problem. Try 5.5 in and the like set the output to the size where most of them clear — most size problems are a design asked to cut smaller than the material allows, not bad geometry. Delete and smooth are there when they're the right answer.

Cut preview

The scissors button beside the canvas controls flips the canvas to what the machine sees: outlines only, no fills, plus the cut line if you've turned one on. It is drawn from the export itself, not a sketch of it, so what you see is what will cut. It's the fastest way to spot a cut line that has combed into thin fingers through fine detail, which is invisible in the painted view and unweedable on the mat. Tap Done in the banner to go back.

# 9.0Settings

• Purchase. Cutline is free to try for 7 days, fully unlocked. The clock starts the first time you open a project, not when you install. After the trial, your projects stay viewable and a one-time purchase unlocks tracing and exporting again. Buy and restore live at the top of Settings, and deleting the app does not restart the trial.
• Side panel. Left or right. Canvas controls follow the panel, so everything stays under the same hand. Left-handed friendly.
• Pencil & touch. Finger drawing behavior and the Pencil double-tap shortcut.
• New projects. Default units, starting style, and canvas background. These are starting points only; every project can change them.
• Editing panels. Match the system look, or keep the panels always light or always dark. The canvas keeps its own backdrop either way, so you can edit with dark panels around a light canvas.
• Show the tour again. Replays the guided walkthrough.
• Acknowledgements. Credits for the tracing engine and the brand typeface.

# 10.0Troubleshooting

• "Couldn't isolate a photo subject." The subject finder couldn't spot a clear subject, so the whole photo was traced. Try Crop in the Input tab or Trace an area only in the Trace tab to scope the trace to your subject.
• Cutline doesn't appear in another app's share sheet. Check the More list at the end of the app row, and open Cutline once after installing. If you shared a web page that isn't an image, the import fails with a message rather than a broken project.
• Small details vanish. Raise Detail, or turn on Fine detail (thin lines) for thin strokes. On full-scene photos, low Detail treats small features as noise.
• Too many tiny pieces. Lower Detail, or use Clean up's Speck size in the Refine tab to sweep them out after the fact.
• Colors look off. Nudge Colors up, since busy photos need more slots, and use Adjust photo to fix exposure before the trace. You can always recolor a whole group from the Refine tab.
• An important color disappears at low color counts. Pin it. Trace once with enough colors to see it, then touch and hold its dot and choose Pin color — always keep. Now reduce Colors and the pinned color stays.
• My design imports at the wrong size in Cricut. Export SVG with the Cricut-safe profile.

Questions, ideas, bugs: andrew@workingmodel.cc